Rain brings up Henderson on Walden's Ridge!

Photos

What a great creek we have in Henderson only about 60 miles from Rock
Island and on the "Mini-Road" (route 30 from Rock Island-Dayton), SWEET.

A road side put-in and 3 miles of class 1-3 drops you into a steep mile of
quality Cumberland Plateau class 5 creeking. Dane has been begging to get
his Side Kick out on something good and two inches of rain on Thursday was
just what the doctor ordered. On Friday, Dane and I went to visit the
Tennessee Scenic Rivers Association 4 day spring river trips at Camp
Nakanawa in Monterey, TN. They were all pumped up as the weather was
co-operating, offering more rivers to run (all of them!) then they could hit
in a year! We got out of there Friday night to plan our Saturday run and
Clay decided on Henderson all of the way down into Richland to the Bow-water
takeout.

John Mcconnaville, Dane, and I met Clay, Keith Yell, and Mark Travis at the
take out and off we went.

We had great group dynamics, even though I had never paddled on a creek with
either Keith or Mark. It was the first run for Dane, Keith, John, and I
with only Mark and Clay having run it before. This made scouting take
longer, and since we had all day, we took our time, and did multiple runs on
several rapids. Keith did laps on almost every rapid, it was fun to see
him so fired up.

Dane’s lines were hard to beat all day as he appeared effortless in getting
his boat to the right spots, and running each drop super clean and with
plenty of reserve mental energy and physical energy.

John is also being a really solid creeker and did great all day. He is
super fired up and you’ll see a lot of him in the years to come.

Clay did awesome all day, as usual and had run the river two times before
and was a great resource for the big rapids.

Mark did a lot of filming and is such a positive force on the river, keeping
it light and fun.

What a great two days. First I got to see and meet a huge group of fun,
active, excited TSRA paddlers who were in the middle of a four day paddling
trip and then go do a small group, new creek for me!

My favorite rapid was Fire Escape which is way too long to take photos of,
since you can’t see the whole thing from the bottom. The last two drops I
aired my Hero out like Superman and the seconds of flying from the lip to
the flat soft landing in the right places were worth a million dollars to
me. The entire experience was awesome but I’ll remember hitting those two
drops not only like I wanted, but getting just a little extra out of them
that I didn’t expect.

I decided not to do Fire Escape a second time because it was as good as it
could get the first time.